FAQ
Contractors & Project Developers

The CleanFi platform carries 3rd-party financing solutions to a very large assortment of project profiles. Our objective is to deliver at least one financing solution for almost any project profile out there. This means addressing a rubik’s cube of conditions (thousands if not more), so we include funders and products across multiple mechanisms which can be used individually, or stacked together (see article), depending on the project profile.  Currently, and depending on the project, we return solutions using:
C-PACE
Loan
Cap Lease
PPA’s
Energy As A Service
Tax Equity Only

As the industry evolves, we are considering other mechanisms as well, in response to market needs.

Per our Mission Statement, CleanFi operates like your Project Financing department, at no cost to you to access all of our services.  We want to deliver you fast, easy, reliable, updatable, actionable access to financing options.  We rely on you to bring your project to successful contract signature using our tools.

We bill funders for “pre-underwriting services”; that means that when one of your projects becomes an application, we make certain that the applicant (your client) has presented a file that is complete and is within the underwriting profile of the funding product for which they are applying.   If we see a discrepancy, we will intervene and interact with the applicant to update or correct the situation, or explain why we collectively need to steer that file to another financing product.  

No.

We could not be further from it, and CleanFi’s project load would not grow as it has if we were.  What we are is your virtual project finance department, a market place for funders looking for application packages on specific projects, a pre-underwriting service that delivers qualified applications for qualified financing products on particular property improvements.

We never sell, share, show, trade, or even infer any information about any project to any party other than participating, qualifying funders for whose product an applicant has applied.

Our discretion, and our users’ trust, is paramount to our success, and we build that trust one project at a time. 

Yes.  Every single one of the quotes you receive is for a real product from a real and vetted financing entity.

Participating funders provide us their products’ complete profiles and underwriting guidelines (rate, term, conditions, size of project, asset class, improvement, type of business, etc), so we can then build that exact product in our database and create an instantaneous proposal when you post a project that matches those guidelines.  The application itself is customized for that specific product from that specific funder.

CleanFi as a platform has no user requirement for accessing our pool of funding solutions. 

All commercial funders presenting their products on CleanFi require fundamental certifications, insurance requirements, and time on the job that legitimize a contractor.   PPA funders often have the requirement that a contractor demonstrate that they have the background experience to build the sort of improvement that the project being financed entails.

Some funders or investors require an onboarding process.  All such requirements are listed in the Notes that are part of each proposal presented.

The use of CleanFi is free.
Each individual funding mechanism, funder and funding product on CleanFi has different features and conditions.  For any solution which has associated dealers fees , we will clearly call them out in the NOTES section of each proposal returned for each of your projects.  Please read the notes associated with each option that you are interested in.

Yes…Since CleanFi does not charge dealer fees, we add our Pre-Underwriting Fee to the financed amount and the estimated payments as well as the amortization schedule include all points and fees associated with that option (unless specifically stated in the breakdown of points and fees)

Per our mission statement, we attempt to address as many different project financing problems as possible.  This requires we cover all of the mechanisms in the Department of Energy’s mapping of funding solutions needed to achieve our societal Net Zero objectives.

Funders and the number of products that are active on CleanFi varies constantly according to various factors. At all times there are at least several dozen or more funders and products on the platform.

Each funder will most often have several products, often spanning across project size, asset class, geographies, or any number of qualifying criteria.

The CleanFi team selects funding mechanisms (i.e., Capital Lease), funders (i.e. Acme Green Bank) and products (e.i., Sub-$250k nonprofit projects in Virginia) based on the need we have to find a financing solution for a particular project category, and the competitiveness of that solution compared to other options in that category.  

CleanFi does not attempt to catalog the financing industry.  We attempt to find the most compelling solutions to each sort of project configuration, and if possible, provide several of the best cooperative options we can find in order to create a marketplace for your project.